This summer ArtsBeat is inviting members of the theater world to contribute to the weekly Theater Talkback column, alternating with the critics Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood. Writers have examined the challenges of casting the role of Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl”; unusual settings for Shakespeare stagings; the buzzkill of pre-show announcements; the etiquette of booing at the theater; and the good that can come from bad reviews. This week, Jack Viertel, the senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, remembers the late songwriter Jerry Leiber and his role in creating a durable if highly debated stage genre, the jukebox musical.

Jerry Leiber, who died on Aug. 22, has been justly celebrated in the last week as one of the fathers of rock ‘n’ roll. Indeed, with his writing and business partner Mike Stoller, he was a force to be reckoned with, turning out hits for Elvis, the Drifters and the Coasters, among others, and building a music publishing empire. What’s been less noted is the strange and wonderful way he straddled many worlds – artist and tycoon, comedian and rock rebel, hipster, vulgarian and aesthete.

He was also responsible, as was I, among others, for creating what was probably the first hit “jukebox musical,” at least the first one using a rock ‘n’ roll catalog – “Smokey Joe’s Café,” in 1995. The trend has continued, but has not always been admired.

I first met Jerry and Mike because they were heroes of mine, although I had mostly seen their names going in circles, at 45 revolutions-per-minute in parentheses, as follows: (Leiber-Stoller). That meant they were the songwriters of whatever record was spinning on my Magnavox. And when I was a kid, they always seemed to be there – “Yakety Yak” got me through the summer of 1958; the first record I ever forced my parents to buy me was a now all-but-forgotten masterpiece of silliness called “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots,” back in ‘55. As an adult, and a Broadway producer, I believed that Leiber and Stoller deserved their own Broadway show.

So did they. They had nearly gotten a few off the ground over the years, including a version of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” and one about Oscar Wilde. (The Guardian recently reported that one is still kicking around.) They wanted to write an original show, and had lots of ideas — ideas that seemed amazing to me, if often somewhat unrealistic. One was for a full-length ballet about a high fashion mannequin who comes to life in a department store window after witnessing a shooting and leads an all night chase through the streets of Manhattan in search of the trigger man, only to end up back in the window, immobilized, the crime still unsolved.

I remember one lyric that Jerry wanted to shoehorn into the piece, in which a band singer described the smart set dancing to a new Latin craze on the rooftop of a ritzy penthouse. It went:

Brazilians with millions
Who dance at cotillions,
And well-heeled Sicilians
Who wear gold medallions,
And illegal aliens
Just reeking of scallions
Are doin’ the Tico Tico.

We were a long way from “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”

On another occasion, Jerry proposed that a lyric could be written for a pawnbroker, the words made up entirely of the declarations of passion and devotion inscribed on the various pocket watches, wedding rings and other tokens of undying love that had ended up in hock.

He was a man with an original mind, much influenced by growing up poor in his father’s corner grocery. Given the fortune he had amassed by the time I met him, he was also amazingly work-averse, so we ended up doing “Smokey Joe’s Café” instead of any of those other shows. (With other collaborators Mike later wrote “The People in the Picture,” which was on Broadway last season.)

For “Smokey Joe’s,” the songs were already written. And they were the songs that I loved. The show was named for a relatively obscure one that ended up barely represented in the final version. Jerry liked the name for the show, though, because, he said, “it sounds like the title of something.”

Fred Prouser/ReutersMike Stoller, left, and Jerry Leiber in 2008.

Jerry saw himself very much as a descendant of the vaudeville tradition – a Jewish comedian, though not a performer himself. He and Mike invented the Coasters, an African-American group with hipster sensibility and virtuosic comic timing. Jerry and Mike not only provided the punch lines, set perfectly to irresistible music, they turned the recording studio into a mini-theater that owed as much to radio drama (and comedy) as to more traditional songwriting. “Other people wrote songs,” Jerry said on many occasions. “We wrote records.”

When he wasn’t trying to be funny, Jerry could turn out straight-faced ballads for Elvis and others of his ilk, but he didn’t like doing it much, and wasn’t shy about saying so. He liked the sly ones, and the raw ones. But some of the biggest hits, he confessed, were what he liked to call “content free – they’re about nothing.” (“Smokey Joe’s” got criticized for making fun of the relentless repetitions in the song “There Goes My Baby”, and some people asked me how Jerry could allow it. Actually, he was the one who suggested it.) But other Ben E. King and Drifters numbers, were wonderfully dark and urgent, and sexy as hell. Stoller kept the music intense, inventive and provocative, and tossed in brilliant little piano licks. Leiber made you remember the words and the ideas behind them.

In putting together “Smokey Joe’s Café,” we were blessed to discover that Leiber and Stoller had started so young (their mothers had to sign their first contracts), and grown up so fast, that they had worked their way through a myriad of periods and styles. They had written for Elvis and the Coasters and the Drifters, of course, but also for raucous Big Mama Thornton (early) and sultry Peggy Lee (late). They’d gotten bored with teenage angst and moved on to the art song. There was an amazing breadth of style, and the show never settled into the sameness that plagues the catalogs of some other rock writers.

The range of material besotted us, and we discovered some forgotten big hits and a few delicious obscurities. One was a song called “Neighborhood,” written in collaboration with Ralph Dino and John Sembello that became the theme of the evening – a scrapbook of images of the past.

“I loved one single couplet in that song,” Jerry once told me, “It went, ‘Here’s a picture of dad’s old car, never got us very far.’ That’s writing, and it made the whole song worth doing.”

He was restless and hip, smart and tough, and — though he covered it well — sentimental in spots. He had one brown eye and one green one, and when he cocked his head and looked up at a certain angle, you knew he’d had an idea, because those eyes would brighten. No one ever knew what would come out of his mouth in those moments, which made him, right then, the best company in the world.

I’m glad to have worked with Jerry, and proud of the show we created. I know, though, that the genre of the jukebox musical, which he (perhaps unwittingly) helped to pioneer, has both fans and detractors. There have been memorable hits (“Mamma Mia!”), memorable flops (“Good Vibrations”), and everything in between. Now it’s your chance to yakety-yak: Is the form a valid theatrical endeavor? Are there undervalued songwriters whose work you’d like to see celebrated on stage?